Conspiracy Check

[Author’s Note: This post is part of the 7 part series Conspiracy Check. The series factchecks the claims of Liberal commentator Thom Hartmann concerning allegations of fraud and treason during 5 presidential elections.]

Thomas Hartmann is a liberal commentator who I praised on this blog in May. Hartmann hosts his own talk radio show. He also has a TV program on RT America. On November 20 and 21, the two days before thanksgiving, Hartmann devoted two segments to the claim by Anonymous, an online political hacker organization, that they had prevented Karl Rove from stealing the 2012 presidential election. In those two segments, Hartmann also described 4 other conspiracy theories surrounding previous presidential elections.

The two segments were titled, “Did Anonymous Save the Election from Karl Rove?” and “Why it’s not crazy to think that Anonymous stopped Karl Roving from Stealing the Election.” Both segments are available on YouTube.

In the second segment Hartmann said, “I believe Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican President.” He concluded that segment by saying, “So here we have all the Republican administrations of the last half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Nixon, Reagan, Bush one and Bush two and every one of them took the White House by fraud and or treason.”

I emailed Politifact to ask them to check the claims in these segments. Politifact never responded to my request. However, I do not fault them for it; they likely receive so many emails a day that they cannot respond to each one. So I decided to check the claims myself.